ABSTRACT
Yechiel Michel Epstein (1829–1908), who wrote the Arukh ha-Shulkhan, was the chief rabbi of Navahrudak in Lithuania (Belorus). His wife was the sister of Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (the Netziv), the head of the Volozhin Yeshiva. He updated and expanded Rav Yosef Karo’s summary of Jewish law, the Shulkhan Aruk (1555), by tracing its sources back to the Bible and Talmud in chronological order, explicating the debates on its laws and their rationales, and adding his own moral and legal views in terms of contemporary conditions. Although coming from a wealthy family, Epstein was very concerned about the extreme poverty of the Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement (including Lithuania and Poland) where most of the Jews in the world lived at that time.
